"graphics" entries

Reform Government Surveillance — hard not to view this as a demarcation dispute. “Ruthlessly collecting every detail of online behaviour is something we do clandestinely for advertising purposes, it shouldn’t be corrupted because of your obsession over national security!”

Growing the Use of Drones in Agriculture (Forbes) — According to Sue Rosenstock, 3D Robotics spokesperson, a third of their customers consist of hobbyists, another third of enterprise users, and a third use their drones as consumer tools. “Over time, we expect that to change as we make more enterprise-focused products, such as mapping applications,” she explains. (via Chris Anderson)

Is Google Jumping the Shark? (Seth Godin) — Public companies almost inevitably seek to grow profits faster than expected, which means beyond the organic growth that comes from doing what made them great in the first place. In order to gain that profit, it’s typical to hire people and reward them for measuring and increasing profits, even at the expense of what the company originally set out to do. Eloquent redux.

DNA Coding, Quartz2D Shell, Hardware Sadness, and Manycore OS

The Slow Winter — best writing about the failure of Moore’s Law and the misery of being in hardware. Ever.

Akaros — an open source, GPL-licensed operating system for manycore architectures. Our goal is to provide support for parallel and high-performance applications and to scale to a large number of cores.

Statistical Misdirection Master Class — examples from Fox News. The further through the list you go, the more horrifying^Wedifying they are. Some are clearly classics from the literature, but some are (as far as I can tell) newly developed graphical “persuasion” techniques.

Dave Winer on Medium — Dave hits some interesting points: Users can create new buckets or collections and call them anything they want. A bucket is analogous to a blog post. Then other people can post to it. That’s like a comment. But it doesn’t look like a comment. It’s got a place for a big image at the top. It looks much prettier than a comment, and much bigger. Looks are important here.

Rise of the Independents (Bryce Roberts) — companies that don’t take VC money and instead choose to grow organically: indies. +1 for having a word for this.

The Performance Golden Rule (Steve Souders) — 80-90% of the end-user response time is spent on the frontend. Check out his graphs showing where load times come from for various popular sites. The backend responds quickly, but loading all the Javascript and images and CSS and embedded autoplaying videos and all that kerfuffle takes much much longer.

MapReduce Patterns, Algorithms, and Use Cases — In this article I digest a number of MapReduce patterns and algorithms to give a systematic view of the different techniques that can be found in the web or scientific articles. Several practical case studies are also provided. All descriptions and code snippets use the standard Hadoop’s MapReduce model with Mappers, Reduces, Combiners, Partitioners, and sorting.

Jobs Quotes, Tao of Programming, Distraction, and Canvas Tutorials

Steve Jobs’s Best Quotes (WSJ Blogs) — Playboy: We were warned about you: Before this Interview began, someone said we were “about to be snowed by the best.”; [Smiling] “We’re just enthusiastic about what we do.” (via Kevin Rose)

The Tao of Programming — The Tao gave birth to machine language. Machine language gave birth to the assembler. The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages. Each language has its purpose, however humble. Each language expresses the Yin and Yang of software. Each language has its place within the Tao. But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it. (via Chip Salzenberg)

In Defense of Distraction (NY Magazine) — long thoughtful piece about attention. the polymath economist Herbert A. Simon wrote maybe the most concise possible description of our modern struggle: “What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” (via BoingBoing)

Just Say No To Freegal — an interesting view from the inside, speaking out against a music licensing system called Freegal which is selling to libraries. Libraries typically buy one copy of something, and then lend it out to multiple users sequentially, in order to get a good return on investment. Participating in a product like Freegal means that we’re not lending anymore, we’re buying content for users to own permanently so they don’t have to pay the vendor directly themselves. This puts us in direct competition with the vendor’s sales directly to consumers, and the vendors will never make more money off of libraries than they will off of direct consumer sales. What that does is put libraries in a position of being economic victims of our own success. I would think that libraries would remember this lesson from our difficulties with the FirstSearch pay-per-use model that most of us found to be unsustainable.

Cost of Computing in Coal (Benjamin Mako Hill) — back-of-the-envelope estimation of the carbon costs of running an overnight multicore Amazon number-crunching job. Thinking about the environmental costs of your crappy coding might change the way you code, much as punched cards encouraged you to model and test the program by hand before you ran it. How many tons of coal are burnt to support laziness or a lack of optimization in my software?

Research Assistant Wanted — working with one of the authors of Mind Hacks on augmenting our existing senses with a form of “remote touch” generated by using artificial distance sensors, such as ultrasound, to stimulate tactile stimulators (vibrating pads) placed against the surface of the head.. (via Vaughn Bell)